Firefox: How to Crash in Style

So Firefox just crashed on me. Again. So why, exactly, am I grinning like an idiot?

Back in the appreciatively nostalgic days, when Phoenix crashed, it just vanished from your desktop with maybe a generic "This program just lost the page you spent an hour trying to find with Google: sucks to be you" dialog and that's it. Firefox 2 made things a little more bearable by keeping track of what tabs you had open. In the event of a crash, it could then restore your session pretty much most of the time.

The one bug-bear was the damned crash reporter. It made you fill in all sorts of stuff, and click buttons, and half the time it just sat there twiddling its thumbs complaining about how it couldn't access the internet.

Enter the current alpha of Firefox 3. This thing makes crashing almost a total non-issue. I was reading through some old Coding Horror posts when Firefox just up and died; vanished from the face of the desktop. A second or two later, it pops up this dialog saying "Aww jeeze; sorry about that. We screwed up, but we'll get right on it." It then gives me a little field to pop in my email address if I want to be kept in the loop, a quit button and a restart button.

I clicked restart, and a few seconds later it's like the crash had never happened. The best part of all is that in the background, it's sending crash data back to those tireless peeps at Mozilla so they can figure out why it crashed, and stop it from happening again.

Why is this so much better than anything else I've used? I think Mozilla have managed to do three things really right with this:

1. There's no long speech about how sorry they are, and how my bug report will help them and that my privacy is always blah, blah, blah, where's the cancel button?

2. They don't ask me for any information at all. The crash reporter is apparently smart enough to get everything they need.

3. There are two prominent buttons: quit and restart. Clicking restart puts me straight back where I was without any fuss.

Contrast this to the OpenOffice.org crash experience¹. When that crashes, it throws up a full-blown wizard, asking for details on what you were doing. When it restarts (eventually, since OOo is so damnably lethargic) it then throws another wizard at you asking you if you want to recover your work. Well, of course I want to recover my work. What a stupid question. And then when it's done that, it stops you again to let you know that it's finished. That's great; get out of my way, already!

Now, all this is not to say that I'm happy with how often Firefox 3 appears to be crashing; I sincerely hope it gets more stable before it gets released proper. But when Firefox does crash, it does what it can to minimise the impact and let you get on with what you were doing.

Really, in an ideal world, this is how all software would work.

To get back to the old car analogies, Firefox 3 is the car that inexplicably explodes every few hours followed by immediately re-assembling itself, all while leaving the driver unscathed.

[1]: Note that I haven't actually had OpenOffice.org crash on me in a while. The following description could, in fact, be an amalgamation of various crash reporters I've experienced.